He had forced Sir John Fisher to withdraw his big ships from the Mediterranean and Pacific, and concentrate them in the North Sea, thus making the British Empire dependent on France for its highway to India. Tirpitz, in his rapid ship-building program, had caused great changes in British naval policy. For several years these men had been conducting a new kind of long-range duel, concretely expressed in new battleships, destroyers, cruisers, and other fighting craft. HMS Dreadnaught represented a contest of wits between the two greatest naval intellects of the day: Sir John Fisher and Admiral von Tirpitz. The previous battleships were disparaged as 'pre-dreadnoughts', but within a decade Dreadnought herself was obsolescent, and with time the term 'battleship' came back into style. Her name, HMS Dreadnought, was derived from 'Fear God and dread nought.' Her name became synonymous with 'battleship.' Or rather, in some discussions the term 'Dreadnought' was used to refer to any ship patterned on her 'all-big-gun' layout, while the term 'battleship' was reserved for ships with the earlier pattern of a mixed battery of large and medium caliber guns. This ship was unquestionably the most powerful afloat, and few ships have captured the world's imagination like Dreadnought. In 1905, King Edward VII of England christened a new ship designed by British Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Fisher.

She touched off the greatest naval arms race in history. HMS Dreadnought, an 18,110-ton battleship built at Portsmouth Dockyard, England, represented one of the most notable design transformations of the armored warship era. The first modern battleship had its inception with the launching of HMS Dreadnought by Great Britain in 1906.

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